[LINK] The Amazon Kindle e-book

[Richard Chirgwin]

Scott Howard wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 6, 2008 at 7:37 AM, <stephen at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
>
>   
>> It will be nice to have the Kimble here in Australia, though imagine what
>> Telstra etc will charge Amazon for the mobile-phone/Internet connectivity.
>> In America, Amazon includes the net connection in the purchase price haha!
>>
>> An expensive arrangement (always-on, often-download) here one would think,
>> and, unlikely to be included in the purchase price whan it gets here, yes?
>>
>>     
>
> It's the Kindle which is "always-on", not the Internet connection (even
> that's debatable, as the whole point of e-paper is that it doesn't need
> power to hold an image).
>
> With the exception of web browsing (which I'm sure could be disabled)
> everything you download over-the-air on the Kindle is chargeable - even if
> it's just downloading your own PDF.  I'm sure there's no end of
> possibilities there for any telco to come up with a viable charging
> structure.
>
> The bigger issue is going to be that the distribution rights for the books
> are frequently going to be very different in Australian than in the US, and
> in many cases Amazon are going to have to completely re-negotiate the rights
> for each individual country.  Given the current demand for Kindle's in the
> US which they can't keep up with, I suspect that other countries like
> Australia are a fair way down their list of priorities...
>   
And long may we remain low on Amazon's priorities, at least as long as 
the Kindle rules are as restrictive as they currently are. As is so 
often the case, the e-book is a trojan for a wide range of restrictions 
on users.

You don't buy a book with Kindle. You buy into a license which says, 
among other things:
- the communications channel belongs to Amazon and can't be used for 
anything other than Amazon content.
- you can only get books if you buy cellular services from an Amazon 
partner; bye-bye mobile portability.
- the book can't be lent, transferred, sold, copied, backed up (as far 
as I can tell) and so on.
- Amazon can track user behaviour down to whether you bookmark a book 
while you're reading it, whether you delete a book, etc
- you can't buy from anywhere other than Amazon

Now, apart from the "wow, this is an e-book!" factor, what's the attraction?

Richard Chirgwin
>   Scott.
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